The Sidey-Mackay village site, excavated by the author in 1926, is located on the farms of Messrs. William F. Sidey and John A. Mackay, on Lot 8, Concession V, Nottawasaga Township, Simcoe County, Ontario, about one mile west of the village of Creemore, in territory known to have been inhabited by the Tionontati Indians, or Tobacco Nation, a tribe of the Iroquoian stock. This site, unlike many in the same area, had suffered little from the depredations of collectors; an instructive representative collection was secured. Additional material was collected by the writer from the surface of the Mackay farm in 1923.

To enhance the recovery of dense, nonfloating botanical remains, we used a siphon subsequent to the normal flotation process. The siphon vacuums the heavy fraction of a flotation sample and retrieves most of the non-floating botanical material. Experiments show an improvement averaging 9.9% and 11.3% by count and weight, respectively, for the recovery of high-density botanical remains using the siphon technique.

The problem of the functional identification of the distinctive grooved wooden clubs from the early archaeological horizons of the Southwest, and of their possible connection with the modern rabbitsticks of certain Southwestern and southern Californian tribes has never been set forth in proper form. Similarity in form does not necessarily signify identity in function. Nowhere should this caution be followed more closely than in the allocation of use by the archaeologist to archaeological specimens. Thus, a disagreement on the identification of a highly specialized form of implement suggests that we may perhaps profitably inquire into the problems presented by the difference in opinion.

Gravel, bone, carbonized seeds, and charcoal recovered from a 2,000 year old cereal pit were successfully separated by chemical flotation. Specific gravities of each material were determined experimentally, and then for each pair of materials to be separated (e.g., bone from gravel, seeds from charcoal), a solution with a specific gravity intermediate between those of the two materials was used for flotation. Optimal sample sizes and possible sources of error are discussed, as are criteria for selection of solutions. A procedure for evaluating the effect of solutions and flotation practices on test seeds is also presented.

E. Z. Vogt has proposed a reconstruction of ancient lowland Maya social organization based on the settlement pattern and organization of modern central Chiapas highland Indian municipios. The occurrence and persistence of Vogt's "typical" Maya pattern is examined. Archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnological data from central Chiapas are used to demonstrate the presence of at least two patterns of settlement in the region at the time of Spanish conquest. These are discussed as imprints of two systems: (1) internally exploitive and (2) externally exploitive. The first represents primary adaptation to natural features of the landscape. The second represents an expansive adaptation to changing social environments. It is suggested that both these systems were in operation at various times in the southern Maya lowlands as well as in the central Chiapas highlands.

Since the excavation of Bat Cave and the location of Cochise implements in situ along the banks of Wet Leggett Wash in western New Mexico, it has seemed likely that one or more of the Cochise periods might be represented in the Middle Rio Grande area where living conditions would have appeared very attractive to hunters and gatherers. In 1949 Bruce T. Ellis collected a series of artifacts, spalls, and cores in and along the surface of a wash in the Atrisco Grant, lying some 3 to 5 miles west of the city of Albuquerque. Most of the 72 possible implements were of such irregular and haphazard design that both Ellis and E. B. Sayles (who examined a representative group of specimens) felt that their identification as objects of human manufacture was open to considerable question. But the remaining group of pressure flaked blades and scrapers, the single point, a slab metate of volcanic scoria with slightly concave surface, and a number of one-handed grinding stones led to hope that further search might locate such materials in position, with the small manos, especially, suggesting Cochise affiliations.

Neutron activation analysis of stylistically similar pottery sherds from the Capacha (Colima) and Opeño (Michoacán) phases gives no evidence for trade or interchange of vessels, either from Openo to Colima, or vice versa, or from a third source to both.

A new and interesting archaeological site was discovered in the Wyoming Basin, just west of the Continental Divide, by Mr. O. M. Finley of Eden, Wyoming, in 1940. It represents a Yuma camp site associated with bison bones.

In the spring of 1940, Mr. Finley discovered seven stone points or fragments on the surface among sand dunes, ahout four miles southeast of Eden. They were concentrated in an area about five by twenty meters at the base of a dune, and the presence of decalcified bone led Mr. Finley to the conclusion that they had weathered out of a Yuma site nearby. A slight amount of excavation produced additional points, in place, along with decalcified bison bone fragments. A Folsom point with the tip gone had been picked up by Mr. Finley in a blow-out about six hundred and fifty meters to the north, which added interest to the site.

This paper is limited to the presentation of the stratigraphic relationships of certain pottery types which are found in a pre-historic village site in central Georgia. These types are site markers of two established cultural horizons in the southeast, and it is evident that their wide distribution and relationships to the chronological framework of the area are of major archaeological importance. In a recently published report of investigations centering in and around Macon, Georgia, A. R. Kelly demonstrates that the Lamar and Swift Creek horizons are differentiated from each other and from other cultural complexes in the region by distinctive traits. Foremost among these traits, for each complex, is pottery.

In spite of deranging factors that have retarded full acceptance, the obsidian hydration dating method has potential for archaeology. Its application to 16 obsidian samples from a Tecep phase burial (A.D. 800-1100+) at the Maya site of Nohmul, Belize, suggests late persistence of occupation and allows for resolution of a stratigraphic problem.

Based on geological and stylistic evidence, we argue that stone palettes found at Etowah were made locally from nearby raw materials. We also show that they were wrapped in textiles and kept in bundles, i.e., that they were objects used in ritual. Etowah palettes were used as portable altars, perhaps in ceremonies that involved anointing other objects with colorful (and spiritually powerful) substances. The realization that palettes were bundled ritual gear should cause us to rethink common assumptions that such objects moved from site to site by means of "trade," or that they functioned as "prestige goods" in the sense of Frankenstein and Rowlands (1978).

Methods used in taking drill cores at a deeply stratified archaeological site in Kanawha County, West Virginia, are reported. A site exposed by river-bank erosion was tested with six cores, and additional deeper levels of probable human occupation were found. The site limits were determined, and evidence was gathered which suggests that the site was originally on an island. This work indicates that core drilling at similar sites in alluvial valleys would be a useful archaeological technique.

A series of farming experiments was conducted between 2013 and 2017 in Range Creek Canyon, Utah, to better understand the opportunities and constraints faced by prehistoric farmers in the Southwest. The experiments were designed to collect data on the optimal amount of supplemental water that should be applied to maize fields given the costs in labor and benefits in greater yield. We investigate expected variation in water management strategies using an optimal irrigation model (OIM). The model makes clear that the payoff for farming is best understood as a continuum of relative success and that irrigation is one activity (probably of many) that may improve farming efficiency as well as increase harvest yields. The optimal harvest will always be less than the maximum harvest when there are significant operating costs associated with irrigation. Estimating the costs and benefits of irrigation in a specific area allows for an assessment of whether irrigation is expected, and if so, how much effort should be devoted to water management. A local dendroclimatological study is used to provide the prehistoric context for the Fremont who occupied Range Creek Canyon, and irrigation is expected even in periods of greater precipitation.

I examine how our capacity to produce accurate culture-historical reconstructions changes as more archaeological sites are discovered, dated, and added to a data set. More precisely, I describe, using simulated data sets, how increases in the number of known sites impact the accuracy and precision of our estimations of (1) the earliest and (2) latest date of a cultural tradition, (3) the date and (4) magnitude of its peak popularity, as well as (5) its rate of spread and (6) disappearance in a population. I show that the accuracy and precision of inferences about these six historical processes are not affected in the same fashion by changes in the number of known sites. I also consider the impact of two simple taphonomic site destruction scenarios on the results. Overall, the results presented in this paper indicate that unless we are in possession of near-total samples of sites, and can be certain that there are no taphonomic biases in the universe of sites to be sampled, we will make inferences of varying precision and accuracy depending on the aspect of a cultural trait’s history in question.

At the Ambo site, chips, splinters, cores, and broken or unfinished implements were spread along a terrace of the Huallaga River near the city of Ambo, Department of Huanuco, Peru. Most of the finds are obviously rejects abandoned near the source of the material from which they were made. Projectile points are abundant and were made by the percussion method, although some were retouched by the pressure method. Many of these resemble projectile points of Lauricocha II and Canario in Peru and of Ayampitin and Intihuasi in the Argentine sierra region, which are dated between 6000 and 4000 B.C.

The study of faunal remains from archaeological sites has been described using a variety of terms including: zooarchaeology, archaeozoology, osteoarchaeology, and ethnozoology. With such a broad spectrum of terms in current usage, we feel that the contradictions and errors inherent in some of this nomenclature need to be corrected. We prefer the term zooarchaeology, as a contraction of the word zoologico-archaeology proposed by Lubbock in 1865, to define the study of animal remains from archaeological sites and their relationship to humans.

Fluting is a technological and morphological hallmark of some of the most iconic North American Paleoindian stone points. Through decades of detailed artifact analyses and replication experiments, archaeologists have spent considerable effort reconstructing how flute removals were achieved, and they have explored possible explanations of why fluting was such an important aspect of early point technologies. However, the end of fluting has been less thoroughly researched. In southern North America, fluting is recognized as a diagnostic characteristic of Clovis points dating to approximately 13,000 cal yr BP, the earliest widespread use of fluting. One thousand years later, fluting occurs more variably in Dalton and is no longer useful as a diagnostic indicator. How did fluting change, and why did point makers eventually abandon fluting? In this article, we use traditional 2D measurements, geometric morphometric (GM) analysis of 3D models, and 2D GM of flute cross sections to compare Clovis and Dalton point flute and basal morphologies. The significant differences observed show that fluting in Clovis was highly standardized, suggesting that fluting may have functioned to improve projectile durability. Because Dalton points were used increasingly as knives and other types of tools, maximizing projectile functionality became less important. We propose that fluting in Dalton is a vestigial technological trait retained beyond its original functional usefulness.

The neutral model of stone procurement developed by Brantingham (2003, 2006) provides a formal means to investigate the formation of lithic discard patterning under changing forager mobility conditions. This study modifies Brantingham's (2006) Lévy walk model to examine the influence of discard probability on the spatial distribution of raw material abundance. The model outcome shows that forager movement and tool discard probability have similar effects on the simulated patterns of raw material transport, so it is difficult—if not impossible—to differentiate the respective influence of the two factors from distance to source distributions alone. This finding of equifinality complicates the task of interpretating hominin mobility from archaeological distance to source data, particularly in settings such as the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, which is marked by an important reorganization in hominin lithic technology that may have affected stone tool discard probability.

Grimstead (2010) develops a transport model that appears to demonstrate that distant patch hunting is energetically efficient at distances of well over 350 km. However, a close examination of her assumptions raises questions concerning the validity of her approach. Here, we examine the effects of using more ecologically justifiable parameters and consider the cost of time spent away from camp on her model’s outcomes. We find that under revised constraints the model yields much shorter maximum transport distances and argue, therefore, that distant patch hunting may be calorically economical in some cases, but not in others.